Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "HistoryLegends"
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@Станислав-с6п8я Manned aircraft can drop more ordinance, but the gap between them and various forms of artillery is shrinking. The quality of indirect fire is pretty amazing, nowadays, due to the proliferation of unmanned aircraft and, of course, satellite surveillance.
But absolutely, the reports of Su-24 bombing runs is indicative of the erosion in Ukrainian air defenses.
War is much more like chess than it was in the 1940s. Both sides have greater knowledge of enemy positions and movement, 24 hours a day, in all weathers.
I'm no expert, but oddly, my first opinions before and after the military operation began have only been reinforced by subsequent events. The only thing that surprised me is the level of duplicity by U.S. officials and the lapdog media. I guess it's not surprising, if you know a little about Vietnam. But due to the Internet, the duplicity is right out in the open, with half the people seeing it clearly, but an alarming half of the people who dig no deeper than what's on cable news.
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"Meat wave attacks" are pretty much Ukraine's stock in trade, which is why the pundits are projecting this onto the Russians.
The Russian "Fire Wall" or "Wall of Fire" method is very expensive in ammunition, but sparing of men, and is nothing new. This was how they marched into Berlin, in 1945: behind a wall of fire.
It's not even uniquely Russian tactic, as this was how Field Marshal Montgomery liked to fight: Overwhelming firepower. Just carpet bomb the area immediately in front of you. Montgomery lost more men to asphyxiation from the "Wall of Fire" than he lost to the Germans in the 2nd Battle of El Alamein.
But yes. From my easy chair, the Russians do appear to be fighting "smarter." They were maintaining pretty straight front lines, for the first year or year-and-a-half. But since Ukrainian air defenses in the south have been depleted or destroyed, we're seeing more classic "maneuver warfare," where the Russians (sometimes) bypass fortifications, threaten encirclement, and attack from 3 sides, in a more classic combined-arms attack with infantry, armor and air support.
Sheer speculation on my part, but I think that when Ukraine still had plenty of equipment and ammo, the classic pincer maneuvers just got the two pincers mangled, due to FPV drones and a then-abundant reservoir of precision artillery on the Ukrainian side. We saw a resurgence of this in the Kursk campaign, where Ukraine mustered the best of what it had left, and decimated more than one Russian convoy of reinforcements. But in the south? I think they're maneuvering much more aggressively with their armor.
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@philippe2715 Not an expert, either, but I'll put my amateur spin on it:
They were forced/induced (Maskirova?) to shift forces to the north by Russian attacks (feints?) along the northern border. Then, maybe they tried to turn a mistake into an advantage, by using those forces to try to use the same trick against the Russians, and provoke them into shifting forces in the East to the Northern front.
The alternative would've been to try to shift those forces back to the main front, where they probably (rightly) realize they weren't going to stop the juggernaut head-on, but they might distract it and turn their blunder into a success. Shifting those forces back to the South would entail a fair amount of attrition.
But as Legends is saying, and others have pointed out, Russia has more than sufficient forces, locally, to rally against the Ukrainian incursions.
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Italy was terrible ground for offensive fighting.
It can be deceptive just looking at losses at the company or even regimental level. There can be objectives that can be taken with under 1,000 casualties, if you can get a suicide company that takes 90% losses to get there before the enemy has had time to fortify or bring up reserves. You lose 162 out of your 180-man company, but if you did it "right," you'd wait until you had 3- or 4-to-1 odds and overwhelming firepower to throw at them, and just level the town, with light, 1% casualties from the 100,000 men you assembled. So by playing it smart and cautious, you lost 1,000 men, when you could have taken the objective 2 weeks earlier, and only lost 162 men.
I'm not saying it's always like that, but if you have the initiative, but only so much force to maintain it, that force can be in for it, but achieve more objectives, sooner, and with lighter losses when you tear your eyes away from the percentage losses and look at the total losses.
As I recall from my history, there were a lot of big egos trying to fight their way up the Italian peninsula faster than the other big egos, and achieving objectives quickly was more important than the losses required to achieve them.
That's why I could never be a general, or would insist on being at the front, and probably not last very long. It takes a different sort of man than I am to send other men into a meat grinder. I'd have nightmares my whole life if I did such a thing by accident, let alone with intention.
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@xblade11230 "Conscripts are only allowed during war, and Russia has technically not declared war yet it's still a smo on paper which puts limits to what troops they can use. Which is why there is such a big push for volunteers."
I think if Russia needed to use conscripts on the front lines, it would find a reason to change that policy/rule in about 5 minutes. I think this policy is about the more or less orderly mobilization, growth, and training of their fighting forces.
In the near term, it works exactly as you say: The minute they're invaded, hundreds of thousands of former noncombatants are activated.
Two years ago, most of them were untrained. Since then, they've had plenty of time to get their basic and advanced training in various specialties. They're still green, which will probably mean heavier losses, but on the other hand, they're fighting on terrain with which they are familiar, and where I imagine there are extensive fortifications and hidden surprises for attackers working in their favor. Also, there's zero moral ambiguity when you're on defense.
I think there will be an ongoing push for volunteers, for the reasons you give, but also for the moral force of volunteers compared to conscripts.
The West has really messed up by thinking a proxy war would weaken Russia and strengthen the West. What they've done is given an excuse to a superpower to rebuild its forces while sharpening its claws on a weaker opponent, with the latest western weaponry, albeit in insufficient numbers. Just enough stress to aid mobilization efforts whose progress exceeds their losses by a large margin.
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Excellent compilation of articles. Much info in little time.
I think the Kursk "incursion" is bad for Ukraine. If they don't get a huge infusion of foreign support, they will collapse. If they DO get a huge infusion of support, they can last a little longer, but the amount of help they need is beyond the West's ability to provide, and trying to help more is just sapping their fragile economies.
The collective West is built on finance, and in spite of its absolute dependence on manufacturing, it's out-sourced major manufacturing sectors. It's regulated much of its resource-extraction and manufacturing out of existence. Oh, we still get manufactured goods, but we buy them from abroad.
We are not at all configured at present to fight any kind of sustained war. We can certainly make a big splash, somewhere, but we would lose a battle of attrition against the Russia, China, and the Global South. India wouldn't take part, directly, but they're going to buy as much cheap Russian oil as they can, and they're good friends with Russia, despite their ties to the West.
I feel like the USA is living on borrowed money and borrowed time. I think our economy is fragile, while Russia's was built under duress and thrives under duress. The West, not so much. We're very enamored of finance and controlling the world through finance and access to credit, but our spending sprees over decades were purchased on credit, and to try to match the rest of the world, we would need to borrow very heavily, and the credit is drying up.
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@gerardslontgezegendezalige4836 Reported use of F16s in ground support operations would seem to suggest that Russian air defenses in that area are weak.
On general considerations, they probably are weak. I think Russia invited this incursion, for the political capital to expand their mission in Ukraine.
ECM and anti-ECM is the next-level competition. It sounds like some of that $61 billion went to new air defenses and ECM units. And they're trying them out where the Russians don't already have similar capabilities.
I think the new ECM equipment is copying what the Russians appear to be doing in the South. They're much more aggressive with their armored vehicles and we're hearing more reports of Russian aircraft flying more classic ground-support missions, which you can only do when you've eliminated or neutralized enemy air defenses.
Ukraine's taking advantage of the soft spot up North, but I think it will backfire on them, because it escalates the Russian response one or two more notches. It activates trained but as-yet-unactivated "garrison troops they have dispersed almost everywhere.
The Ukrainians having given them the excuse to not only build up in that soft area, but to also go beyond the Ukrainian border. Ukraine might be getting some good press right now, but Russia's friends are going to believe Putin's only reacting to provocations, and using great restraint. This plays good to China, India, and the Global South. The Ukrainian gainst, in the short term, plays good to Western audiences.
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Yes.
Makes me think these nations need to totally de-colonize. That means kicking us all out! Europeans (including Americans), Russians, and Chinese!
Maybe what they need is permaculture from India! Import 10,000 Indian villagers with successful water projects under their belts, and go to work!
That's what I think of when I look at these war-torn regions. If they could somehow get the upper hand against greedy psychopaths, there's no limit to what they could create. Build a reservoir and pay for it (and other projects) with the gold!
sigh We know enough about permaculture, now, we should see little oases popping up all over that (and other) part(s) of the world. Places where there happens to be gold, these oases would pay for themselves!
But no. People want to dig up the gold as fast as possible and get out, to spend the gold somewhere else on somebody else.
For as long as I've been alive, it's been impossible to achieve anything resembling a prosperous democratic republic, with real guarantees of people's civil (property) rights, and a culture and government that protects them. There's no limit to the good that could be done. There is a limit to the destruction that can be done. We've seen it. It looks like Hell.
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